Given
how long I’ve been aware of her name and her work, it seems amazing somehow that
Brooklyn poet and illustrator Bianca Stone’s new Someone Else’s Wedding Vows (Portland OR/Brooklyn NY: Octopus
Books/Tin House, 2014) is only her first trade poetry collection. If you’ve
seen the recent Anne Carson collection, Antigonick
(Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2012), you’ve already seen some of Stone’s
artwork, and one of the only frustrations that I can see with this collection of her poems is the fact that only a single image of hers, gracing the cover,
is included. The poems in this collection, organized in three untitled
sections, are lyrics of exploration and clarification, constantly seeking out
what might otherwise be never understood. Some of the flavour of Stone’s
striking straight lines are reminiscent slightly of the work of contemporary
American poets such as Hailey Higdon, Hillary Gravendyck, Emily Kendal Frey and
Emily Pettit for their subversion, discomfort comfort and use of the straight
phrase. As she writes in the middle of the single-stanza three-page poem “Outpost”:

The ancient clouds move

over the alcoholic sky.

I have seen the grey
beards

of Northern Florida,

swum with the sea cow.

I have listened to the
brief

troubles of the old,
black cat.

I saw my mother flume

toward the abyss and
draw back.

And I, who was half
asleep

for my one earthquake,

now merely a fragment

looking for the center
of the earth.

There
is such a sadness resting behind so many of these poems, coupled with a
particular kind of fantastic observation that couldn’t be achieved any other
way, akin to light shining through a deep dark. Hers are long passages that
accumulate strikes and quirky lines and the collision of emotional highs and lows.
There is a distinctive and oddball charm to these poems, whether the poem “Because
You Love You Come Apart,” that opens with “Your hair is wonderful today. / This
is a microscopic caress at a party.” or the poem “Elegy,” subtitled “with Judy
Garland & refrigerator,” with lines some of which strike as hard and deep
as a punch: “I take out my collection / of tissue and listen to Judy Garland /
sing Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas, / her voice like some wildflower /
absorbing into the crimped human mind / an infinite medium of grief— / this human
brain that cannot assume / the trust position.” How does anyone manage such forceful
writing from a first trade collection? Perhaps as the daughter of poet Abigail Stone and granddaughter of poet Ruth Stone, she had the advantage of a particular
kind of education, or perhaps her innate attention to detail and the line was all
she required. And there is a deep attention here, to a life as it is lived, and
to the quirky thoughts that so often quickly pass, and those dark places we aren’t
meant to visit, let alone attempt to understand.